“Our communities are suffering because of the harm inflicted in these schools.” Her aim in Five Little Indians is to make those hurtful experiences come alive and to show their damaging long-term effects. “I’ve been thinking about residential schools and their impacts in many ways since I was a child,” she remarks. Good’s mother and her entire family were not so fortunate. In interviews, Michelle Good notes that she felt compelled to write about residential schools, though she herself did not attend one. All five end up at various times on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

At the Mission School, the children were abused and stripped of their Indigenous heritage. When they were small children, they were taken from their homes and placed in a residential, church-run school located in British Columbia.

In her first novel, Five Little Indians, the Cree writer Michelle Good counters the toxic stereotypes about Indigenous people that have long dominated mainstream writing, social discourse and the media. Her novel offers a space for Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers to enter the lives of five residential school survivors -Lucy, Kenny, Clara, Howie, and Maisie. Look no further than the narratives about Indigenous people found in settler-colonial sources which are often little more than destructive fictions.

In his 2003 Massey Lecture, the novelist Thomas King -the first person of Cherokee descent invited to be a Massey lecturer -stated: “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” Stories can transform a culture, but they can also attempt to destroy one.

Author michelle good